Talk about strange timing.

A committee at Southern Illinois University has just released a 17-page report on how to deal with plagiarism. The report was prompted by the revelation last year that the chancellor of the university’s Carbondale campus, Walter V. Wendler, had borrowed portions of a strategic plan from an earlier strategic plan that he helped write. Mr. Wendler has since stepped down.

The release of the report, however, comes as the president of Southern Illinois, Glenn Poshard, is defending himself against allegations that he plagiarized numerous passages in both his Ph.D. dissertation and his master’s thesis.

The chairman of the panel that wrote the report told the Associated Press that its issuance today was coincidental and not related to the Poshard allegations.

The report doesn’t offer much in the way of specifics on how to deal with allegations of plagiarism or how plagiarists should be punished. And its language leaves plenty of wiggle room. For instance, it says that plagiarism “involving small quantities of copied material” need not be investigated. But “small quantities” is not defined, nor are any examples given.

The report also, mysteriously, says that, even in cases of “substantial intentional plagiarism,” there may be “extenuating circumstances” that mitigate punishment. Much of the report, in fact, deals with plagiarism by students, not members of the faculty or administration.

Whether the report will have any effect on Mr. Poshard’s case, which is currently being evaluated by another committee of faculty members, remains to be seen. —Thomas Bartlett